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Sheriff’s Investigator Wanted Mel Gibson’s Ex Charged with Extortion

The Sheriff’s Department detective who led the investigation into charges of extortion by Mel Gibson’s ex-girlfriend is not happy that prosecutors rejected the case. Earlier this month, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office declined to charge Oksana Grigorieva, and the decision prompted Detective Rodney Wagner to fire off a letter voicing his objections. But prosecutors remain unmoved. From the LA Times:

A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, Jane Robison, … downplayed Wagner’s letter as “his opinion.”

“He’s not an attorney. Our attorneys reviewed the case and declined to file based on the evidence and the lack of evidence,” Robison said.

Grigorieva’s current attorney, Daniel Horowitz, said Wagner had mistaken bare-knuckles legal negotiations for a crime.

“Lawyering is a very tough business,” he said.

We aren’t lawyers or detectives, but we know that for plenty of people child support and alimony feels like extortion. That doesn’t mean it is.

And if Grigorieva did threaten to leak the tapes to get cash out of Mel Gibson, it’s a good thing it didn’t work. Not because it may or may not have been extortion, but because those recordings were so informative. The media has for too long turned a blind eye to racism and sexism among the Hollywood elite. Those tapes told us more about Gibson than a million celebrity profiles ever could.